hat this new mental attitude really is; for it is our
adoption of this attitude that is the Key to the whole position. Put
briefly it is ceasing to include the idea of limitations in our conception
of the working of the All-Creating Spirit. Here are some specimens of the
way in which we limit the creative working of the Spirit. We say, I am too
old now to start this or that new sort of work. This is to deny the power
of the Spirit to vivify our physical or mental faculties, which is
illogical if we consider that it is the same Spirit that brought us into
any existence at all. It is like saying that when a lamp is beginning to
burn low the same person who first filled it with oil cannot replenish it
and make it burn brightly again. Or we say, I cannot do so and so because I
have not the means. When you were fourteen did you know where all the means
were coming from which were going to support you till now when you are
perhaps forty or fifty? So you should argue that the same power that has
worked in the past can continue to work in the future. If you say the means
came in the past quite naturally through ordinary channels, that is no
objection; on the contrary the more reason for saying that suitable
channels will open in the future. Do you expect God to put cash into your
desk by a conjuring trick? Means come through recognizable channels, that
is to say we recognize the channels by the fact of the stream flowing
through them; and one of our most common mistakes is in thinking that we
ourselves have to fix the particular channel beforehand. We say in effect
that the Spirit cannot open other channels, and so we stop them up. Or we
say, our past experience speaks to the contrary, thus assuming that our
past experiences have included all possibilities and have exhausted the
laws of the universe, an assumption which is negatived by every fresh
discovery even in physical science. And so we go on limiting the power of
the Spirit in a hundred different ways.

But careful consideration will show that, though the modes in which we
limit it are as numerous as the circumstances with which we have to deal,
the thing with which we limit it is always the same--it is by the
introduction of our own personality. This may appear at first a direct
contradiction of all that I have said about the necessity for the Personal
Factor, but it is not. Here is a paradox.

To open out into manifestation the wonderful possibilities hidden in the
Cre